Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four­minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic. Abdellatif Kechiche, director of last year’s sexually sensationalist Blue Is the Warmest Colour, might have done better if he had taken a leaf out of Hammer’s book. Hammer calls the film her ‘lesbian commercial’.